The trials and tribulations of raising and educating a profoundly gifted girl.
Please note. My apologies if the following seems disjointed and rambling. I have tried to just ‘brain dump’ my thoughts and feelings while I’ve typed and thought about what it was like for me to grow up not knowing what it was that made me different and more importantly, not having anyone recognise and cater to this difference.
Archie’s portfolio has been written largely by me, Archie’s mother, while wearing two distinctly different ‘hats’. The first ‘hat’, is that of a concerned mother who wants the very best outcome possible for her little girl just like every parent does.
The second ‘hat’ is one that I have been wearing for a lot longer…and that is the hat of an unrecognised gifted child/adult who lived through 30+ years of being different, and not understanding why. A gifted child/adult who ended up undergoing 3 years of intensive psychological therapy to undo the damage to my self-worth and to treat my long term anxiety and depression that was largely caused by me not knowing what it was that made me different to others around me – essentially, I felt ‘weird’ and didn’t know why. A woman who, for the most part, owes her life to the psychologist who helped her find a reason for living other than the love for her family. It is this ‘hat’ that drives me to ensure that Archie’s experience of life is a vast improvement on my own.
I was always different. From early accounts of my behaviour I nearly drove my poor mother mad. At the grand old age of 9 months I got up and started walking. I stopped having a daytime sleep before my fist birthday, I talked incessantly (still do) and have gravitated towards adults and older friends for as long as I can remember.
I have been told that I ‘devour’ books. I am like a sponge when it comes to learning – constantly seeking out new information. And I am a research junkie who always needs to pare down the ‘really interesting stuff’ that she’s found for an assignment. Knowledge is power to me, and so anything that I don’t understand gets researched to within an inch of its life. Then I’m happy.
In Primary School, I was the A grade student to whom most things came easily. I was the junior librarian who quite by accident memorised the entire Dewey system numbers. But I was lonely. I didn’t relate to the other kids around me. They weren’t interested in me and my ‘weird’ past times, and I wasn’t particularly interested in theirs. But I wanted to be like THEM. This went way beyond the usual desire of wanting to fit in which is common to all children. At some level I already knew that there was something different about me and that in my mind, it wasn’t normal
This idea that there was something weird about me became more and more invasive at around 5th – 6th grade. Looking back on it today, it was probably around the time that my best friend, a young boy with wild ideas and an impossible imagination the same as mine, left my school.
By Year 7 this feeling of being different was a pretty constant dialogue in my head. And I still couldn’t work out WHY I felt different to them – I just knew that I was. Finally, I worked out how I could BE like all the other kids, at least on the outside. I could stop trying and I could stop caring about my work and my grades.
During Years 8 though to 10 I was the absolute epitome of a gifted child who was dumbing down and going underground with her natural abilities. I hung around with the tough but not very bright kids at my high school because THEY were normal. More importantly, they weren’t picked on. I was a rebel without a clue. I mucked up, wagged school, smoked, drank – you name it I did it just about.
I was just an angry and confused teenager whose external behaviour was diametrically opposed to her internal beliefs but who was sick to death of feeling like she came from another planet. Imagine if you can sitting in the class room of the top English class listening to your teacher reading Shakespeare and being almost moved to tears by the beauty of the language. Now imagine that same young girl acting externally as if it was the worst use of language she’d ever come across, and going out of her way to disrupt the class. This was my life each day. It was only ever in the solace of my own mind that I allowed myself to simply be me. I lived two separate lives – the real internal self…and the external trouble maker who wasn’t very bright.
Sadly, even as my grades started to slip, I still didn’t feel normal. If I acted dumb and pretended like I had the same interests as these other kids, at least then I wasn’t lonely or treated like a freak. I was, at some level, accepted. But I could never reveal the ‘real’ me to any of them. I had to keep her hidden from everybody. In some way I envied the bright kids who were smart enough to be themselves. Perhaps they already knew WHAT they were. I didn’t think that I was like them as by this stage but in some corner for my mind I was jealous for their ability to seemingly not care what others said, thought or did.
One thing was for sure, I didn’t want to be treated like ‘squares’ were as constant harassment for reading books or doing your work seemed like a far worse choice than hiding who I was. So I kept acting dumb.
Through all this time, all these years, the phrases “not living up to her potential, not fulfilling her academic capacity” and similar would show up on my school reports – mostly for the subjects I didn’t enjoy or was bored with. I still managed to get excellent grades and awards for the subjects where the teacher challenged me or allowed me more freedom. I’ve got to wonder now, didn’t anybody notice that the same child who received honour certificates was also obtaining D’s in other subjects? Wouldn’t you think that this disparity in achievement would alert someone to a potential problem, or was it just that nobody cared?
Either which way, it was only my negative behaviour that was addressed…not the underlying issues. I had a really poor opinion of mental health workers for a long time because of a run in with the school counsellor. He had no clue – neither did I. It didn’t end well. But from that moment on, all shrinks were a waste of space.
The short story to all of this is that I hated myself – plain and simple. I left high school at the end of Year 10. I had no sense of self-worth, no direction, no desire for anything really. I still felt different to most of the people around me and I felt totally unfulfilled. I simply couldn’t see a way out of it at the time and I didn’t know what it was.
My life spiralled into a deeper and darker depression to the point where I was completely out of control. But I’d become so good at carrying on with two lives, so good at showing one facade on the outside and another on the inside, that nobody around me knew just how bad things were for me.
At the age of 33 I found a wonderful psychologist who literally saved my life. As we worked through my issues, he suggested that the root of most of my problems was the fact that I was not dumb as I’d managed to convince myself - I was actually very clever and that this was why I felt different, because I WAS, but at an intellectual level. And that in a lot of ways, I was very normal for the level of intelligence that I had. I couldn’t believe him. It went against everything that I believed about myself. He wouldn’t test me though because I wanted to see how dumb I was. Wrong question to ask.
A number of years later (and after this document was originally written) I was tested by our gorgeous educational psych. So now I know what I am.
After a great deal of emotionally draining work, I am a lot healthier mentally now. I am slowly becoming more comfortable with the idea that I am vastly different to most people and that I do think differently and about different things – and that’s ok. I am also slowly realising my potential. I finished a psychology degree last year and I did incredibly well for a Year 10 drop out. I’ve found intellectual peers who don’t think I’m a freak and who I don’t have to hide my true colours from. I have found something that I am passionate about. I can finally be me.
But it’s been a long, tiring, dangerous road to get to this point and I often wonder how different my life would have been if someone had said to me when I was much younger – you’re different, and this is the reason why. If they’d challenged me at school so that I developed study skills and I was able to act on my love for learning. If they’d fostered my inquiring mind in some way.
But I don’t want pity. I’m where I am in my life because it’s where I’m meant to be. My point is that I could have potentially been spared the psychological harm that I endured had someone identified me earlier and then acted upon what they found.
Because of my experience, I’ve made certain that Archie understands that she’s different. I’ve explained to her that she thinks differently to most people around her and that this doesn’t make her weird or strange. Just different. She knows that her family will ‘get her’ and her jokes and she feels safe and secure around us all. But I desperately want her to receive some level of understanding from those around her at school as well because understanding and acceptance is so very, very, very important to ‘us’ gifted kiddies.
This is my main driving force for wanting Archie’s special needs addressed NOW. I already see some of my negative traits in her such as not wanting to try more challenging work, because she’s never had to. She has a love for learning that needs to be fostered by people around her and not just at home. To see her grab hold of an idea and run with it is an absolute joy for me, and I miss learning with her like I did when she was at home. So now, I’m entrusting this child to you, her educators, and hope that you can see some of what I see in her.
She’s a wonderful, special, unique little person who I love to death and the thought of her going through what I went through is more than I can bear. Please take good care of her.